Surrogate Leadership
Surrogate Leadership
As I became engaged in the dialogue a lot of learning happened about the leadership, some of which I don’t buy. As a reader you may also decide not to buy some of them. I thought of narrating the outcome of the conversation and named this concept as “Surrogate Leadership”.
Mr. Rohan said that every leader must have three domain of leadership i.e. political leadership, Conceptual leadership and inspirational leadership. Political angle to the leadership is the part of leader’s ability to be politically right and source the power centre in the power brake system. In this quotient leaders are busy establishing their power mechanism inside the system and most of his/her time is spent on showcasing the authoritative power and getting the things done of his/her choice. Conceptual leadership is the part of leader’s ability to design and deliver the concepts in the form of processes and systematic operation manual. In this quotient leader focuses upon creating a process and manuals which will be followed by the organizations in years to come. Inspirational leadership is the part of the leader’s ability to inspire people for management by objective and also have their own vision and mission to achieve and take the organization to a great height.
According to him, 50% of inspirational, 40% conceptual and 10% political is the right combination. Although this calculation may not be agreed by everyone but most of them will believe that a leader should have an inspiring aura around such that people should accept him as leader. If the leader tries to force the authority, then leadership losses its basic ingredients.
Though my thoughts were not agreeing to whatever he said, but I kept my patience till he finishes. I wanted to understand his environment in which he was operating and then reach to the conclusion.
He worked in a company for quite some time and when he acquired the skills to lead the department, he found someone else taking up the position as a lateral entry in the organization. He was disappointed and wanted to leave the organization and find out new organization, where his skills should be respected. Then his loyalty and wish to add value to the system in the current organization stopped him. The new man who joined seemed to have a different orientation towards the management. His political acumen in the leadership style was taking over the other acumens. He found that there are more intellectual and skilled people whom he has to lead, which can only happen with the inspirational acumen, which he was lacking. Therefore he started creating a space for him via political acumen. In other words, make the boss happy with whatever he wanted and change his perception that before he joined everything was mess and he is the Krishna who will change the organization and clear the mess, given complete authority to rule the peers and subordinate.
On the other hand, he started communicating to the subordinates that boss is very happy with his vision and he has given him complete authority. He went on creating groups under groups such that there should not be a scope of direct communication with the higher ups. If somebody goes and talks to them, he will not like it and also take necessary actions.
As usual the next process was to make his people the head of the domains such that he will have direct control over the information and he will be refining those before it reaches the higher ups.
The third simple process was to pressurize and demotivate the hard working people who were sincerely contributing to the organization but was not political and were thinking that they will change the organization by skills and technical capability.
The fourth one will be an obvious outcome that the people who are not comfortable will start looking for other Job and design their own exit pathways and synchronize it with their decent departure.
This will keep organization healthy as only known and networked people will be working which will lead to a great team of political performance. This will go on till the financial outcomes of the company is affected and a search for root cause starts. But to the surprise of management, the leader has one escape goat planned in his team, who is having the lowest political quotient. He will be made responsible without an authority and therefore he will be responsible for the results but not the process control. Higher ups will be happy that they have found the root cause and have a responsible person who will correct the process in future.
His frustration was visible in his words and without any clue from my side, he portrayed the picture of the leader in front of me. I decided to get into the dialogue trying to understand the circumstances. I started asking him about his background and number of years of corporate experience and things like that, to understand the level of corporate maturity.
He said he has 22 years of experience and has worked with many reputed corporate house. He also said that he has experienced many leaders and also came across many good leaders whom he categorized as inspirational leader.
22 years of experience is not a small experience to have corporate maturity. As an academician, I picked up some threads and started putting the incidents in a sequential manner. I understood that there will be many such organizations and people who have tested the success by the means of political leadership in the organization and has developed a belief that political correctness and nearness to the power gives them the success if they have little conceptual and inspirational skills.
I named this as “Surrogate Leadership”. I went on to describe the leader’s quality to identify the approach of leadership.
In this kind of leadership style the leader would seek the following.
Attention
Appreciation
A bunch of corporate grapevine.
A moderate performer.
One or two skilled people to deliver the results.
During his desire to achieve all these above mentioned points, he would be in hurry to change many things in the organization. He will be in the mode of dictating as reverse to the collaborative leadership. He would talk about shared vision but would not seriously mean it. He would ask for ideas but would not seriously mean it. He would ask about support but would not really appreciate it.
Certainly, these kind of leadership quality is dangerous for the organization. Organizations should be transparent in terms of reporting system and should not encourage people oriented comments. I have a different experience as the organizations where I worked had sophisticated and professional ways of handling these issues. This boils down to a school of thought where recruitment of people and talent hunt seems to be responsible. Secondly, it also gets into the issues of cost vs resource. I strongly feel organizations should not worry in terms of cost if good environment needs to be created.
I think this was a learning for me as surrogate leadership, where people hide their talent and try to acclaim achievements on political acumen. I am sure many organizations have found out various means to address these issues but some have not.
Our flight reached Kolkata and we departed with learning from each other. May be it is learning incident for many corporate houses.
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